‘Um, guys, could you excuse me for a second? I’ll be right back.’ I hurried out of the room and snapped the phone open. ‘What’s up, Mom? Anything urgent? I was in a meeting actually.’

‘Megha! I just called to remind you about today, I hope you remember? You’re meeting Gautam for dinner!’

God, it was Friday already! The day I was supposed to meet Gautam. I had clean forgotten of course, but there was no way I could let the Momster know that. After reassuring her that I would meet Gautam at the appointed hour I rushed back to continue the meeting, slightly resentful about all these dutiful-daughter-type responsibilities that I was expected to fulfil. I mean, wasn’t it enough that I had been the model daughter all my life, pretty much doing what my parents expected me to? Wasn’t it enough that I’d always done well in school, gotten an MBA from the most prestigious business school in the country and landed a good job? Apparently not. For now, after a stressful work week, and on a Friday at that, I was expected to get all dolled up and meet a prospective groom to impress him with my matrimonial potential.

I wasn’t feeling any more cheerful as I trudged to the washroom later that evening after having wrapped up the meeting with the agency. Work-wise it had been a good day and the meeting had gone off really well but this was just the beginning. We still had a lot of developmental work left, after which it would go through several rounds of internal approval and market research before it would finally grace the outside world in the form of a brand new thirty-second television commercial. For something that had a duration of only thirty seconds, it sure took a lot of hard work, I thought as I surveyed myself in the washroom mirror.

I was scheduled to meet Gautam for dinner at a suburban restaurant close to office and I had decided to head there straight after work. I had already kept a change of clothes for myself in office since I’d known that I would have to meet Gautam sometime during the course of that week.

Splashing some cold water on my face, I quickly applied some kohl and lip gloss and ran a comb through my hair, before appraising myself in the mirror again. I had inherited Mom’s trouble-free complexion and her large, honey-brown eyes which were a dead giveaway for what I was feeling at any point in time thanks to their highly expressive nature. But my biggest asset was my hair. Shiny, thick and dark, it fell around my face in waves and shimmered down gracefully till a little below my shoulders. I looked at it critically now as it swung around freely. Something was missing. Ten minutes later I was done and my image in the mirror looked back at me with a satisfied smile.

In my canary yellow, embroidered salwar kameez and kohl-lined eyes I looked every inch the traditional Indian belle. And just so there wasn’t any confusion in Gautam’s mind when he saw me, I had taken it a step further by tightly braiding my hair and adding on a pair of long, dangly, sparkling earrings, something that I wouldn’t be caught dead in otherwise. I hoped my desi avatar would be a suitable turn off for the US-based Gautam who, from the little I’d tried to find out about him, sounded like the typical Americanized yuppie. Born and bred in India, he’d jetted off to the land of opportunity after doing his engineering and had stayed on for good. He was now employed in a large software firm there and, having achieved all his career aspirations, was on the lookout for an open-minded, progressive, career-oriented woman who could be his life partner, as Mom had hopefully informed me.